5. What is the difference between acute and chronic infection?

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the
difference between acute and chronic infections because the other
speaker will deal with that. But I just wanted to give you a sense of the
difference. Acute infections are short term. They last
no more than six months by definition. It’s not that they don’t sometimes last
longer, but by definition they don’t last more than six months after
onset and it’s terminated because there’s an adequate immune response
to the virus. And the important thing is that there does
not appear to be any increased risk of liver cancer for people who
have an acute infection and get over it. But chronic infections last for years and
they do carry the increased risk of chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis,
liver cancer, and death.